Careers in bioengineering

Biomedical engineering graduates from Imperial College London have excellent career prospects in a wide range of careers. They will be well equipped for employment in the growing industrial sector devoted to healthcare, hospitals and clinics, research institutes and government or for other public organisations concerned with the design and regulation of medical materials and equipment.

Because of the breadth of multi-disciplinary nature of the courses, graduates will be welcomed in the industrial, commercial and consulting areas, where analytical and problem solving skills may be useful for a wide range of applications.

For the same reason. we expect that a substantial number of our graduates will follow research careers, both in industry and in academia.  

Biomedical engineers are employed across a number of areas:

• Medical Device Design, Development, Analysis and Marketing - medical device industry, health service and government
• Medical Device Regulation - medical device industry and government (NICE and MHRA)
• Clinical Engineering - hospitals and clinics
• Research - universities, industry, research organizations, and government
• Rehabilitation Engineering - rehabilitation clinics and centers and hospitals
• Consulting - private or general engineering consulting firms
• Finance- investment banking specialising in healthcare/ medtech investment
• Further professional study - medical school (surgical training) or law school (patent attorney)  

There are a number of further study options following a undergraduate degree in bioomedical engineering. Whether its masters, PhD, medical or law programme you are interested in you have lots of options. 

Medical practice is becoming increasingly technological and a number of our students decide on graduate entry medicine and eventually qualify with engineering and MBBS degrees. Because part of the biomedical engineering course is taught conjointly with staff from the medical school, our students are in a good position to take the accelerated route through the graduate medical curriculum. Information on graduate entry medicine at Imperial can be found in the undergraduate prospectus. 

Other graduates work in the NHS as Clinical Engineers working in roles such as medical engineering, rehabilitation engineering, radiation protection and medical physics.

If you like design and development this could be for you; the demand for cost effective, efficient health care technologies is unlikely to decrease: from intelligent orthopaedic implants to tissue engineering, to prosthetic devices for hearing and vision - all of these are areas of technology with huge potential for the development of new designs and the refinement of existing systems.

Graduates from the department have gone on to work for exciting companies such as Biomet, Philips Healthcare, Sg2, a global health care consultancy firm and the Acrobot Company Limited. Originally a spin-out from Imperial College London specialising in surgical robotics, Acrobot was aquired by Stanmore Implants Worldwide in 2010.

If you decide at the end of your degree that biomedical engineering is not the career for you. There are still a number of career options for you. Due to the nature of our degree, which encompasses elements of biology, computing, electronics and mechanics, some of our graduates have gone into careers which traditionally favour numeracy, such as finance and IT, finding employment with prestigious, global companies such as Goldman Sachs and IBM.

Others have gone onto careers that build on a solid understanding of biology, such as medicine or into other engineering disciplines, gaining employment in companies such as Schlumberger, a leading oilfield service provider, Apple and Jaguar Landrover.